I've seen those threads with lists of all of those alternate OS's out there, and I was wondering... anyone have any idea which are the biggest out there besides the three of Windows, Mac OS, and Linux/BSD? Plan 9? Zeta? What's a good OS to switch to if you really want something out of the mainstream but yet big enough to have a good, solid userbase?

Linux!!

I know I did not answer your question, but I think this is the answer to the part I quoted. To me, "mainstream" means Windows, Mac, and maybe Unix. In some circles, Linux is mainstream...in others it is still fringe. (Maybe one could argue that "mainstream" still means proprietary.)

Anything without magazines on the rack or books on the shelf could hardly have a "good, solid userbase".

I agree, these are two different questions.
On one hand there still is the be-os/haiku thing which I think looks quite promising (again). And the rest is pretty much either some *nix thing or long out of development. There's also React-OS. An honorable effort, but... well, I don't know.

There's also Novells old OS... forgot the name.

I was going to say QNX or VxWorks (both used heavily in controllers/embedded systems), but checking Wikipedia, it appears that both are Unix-like, at least now. They probably wouldn't be all that good for desktop use either. Back in the day lots of people liked BeOS and the Haiku project is now attempting to build an open source clone of BeOS. It's inching towards usability, from what I hear, but is not there yet. I've never used BeOS or any of its derivatives, though, so I can't comment.

Well I suppose you could use AROS. Its an open source OS aiming at compatibility with the AmigaOS but it can run on the x86 platform. Dont expect anything like a userbase though. It just might be a fun thing to try.

http://aros.sourceforge.net/

OS/2 still has a fair number of users, though unfortunately it seems like their vendor hates them, since the vendor is no longer giving support and refuses to let any part of the operating system go into the public as open source.

IMHO the best designed open-source operating systems are thoes base on the Berkly Software Distribution (such as NetBsd Open Bsd and of course Mac Os Leopard.

I tried AROS to revive an ancient cubase arrangement. It was a pain to get running, but I was astonished at how advanced the system was for it's time. The software it ran and what it was capable of in music production was clearly ahead of its time. - As I understand it AROS is the virtual machine... there is an AmigaOS clone that you can install on it, I installed the original OS.

- Looking at the Sourceforge page... I might be mixing things up here, don't quote me on this.
I think I have a different project in mind...

z/OS, maybe?

Those seem like contradictory requirements. If Linux and the BSDs are too mainstream for you, we must have different ideas about what a "good, solid" user base means.

solaris is fairly good,

ok its a UNIX but still its different

Since this is already all over the map, I might as well throw in VMS.....Wait!!..there's more: CP/M

I have forgotten the point of this thread. I thought OP wanted something with a userbase----for some of the things here, the userbase is mostly dead.....

There's also OS/400, an IBM midrange OS. It's probably not very useful to most home/hobbyest users. The computer I use at work supports thousands of users from all over the world, and I never see a delay from resource competition from others. The native human interface is still text based, although most people access it from a PC desktop for a graphical interface.

Not surprising since the first version of cubase was written for commodore 64.

I was there and bought it 8)

I could hold a max of 3 midi arrangements in memory, and pitch bend was to be avoided at all cost :P

It's very expensive in terms of memory, especially when you get around 39k of userland to stretch in. recording pitch bend (or any other type of analog like change-over-time parameter data) would burn memory really fast.

I bet on the Amiga it was outstanding. I'm still an SX3 user though, my xp partition is collecting dust. I don't think there will ever be a dongle driver for linux, much less a 32 bit compat for wine for the driver 8*(

There is a vst plugin wrapper though, which is what's really important to me. I'm playing with jack right now, as soon as I get my jack sound squared away tonight it's on to ladspa and the rest of the goodies.

UAD looks like it's the only thing I won't be able to use.

An oss driver for the processor host card and gcc/asm hack would be a fun thing to spend the rest of my life figuring out... hmmm maybe even worthy of a project?

-Viz

That's because mainframes are true multiuser systems. x86 emulates it and has laughable IO and processor scheduling capabilities by comparison.

mainframes could move terabytes of data in seconds back in 1990. Today they are even more powerful. They've been working on virtualization technology since 1967.

x86[whatever] was designed to run on your desktop and that's where it really belongs.

To pseudo quote someone who really understands them:
mainframes are true multiuser systems designed to handle many thousands of users.
x86 is for the pretty stuff.

You have to laugh at the fact that people tried to run the big jobs on unix systems and now the big jobs are moving to unix systems hosted on, you guessed it, mainframes. It's still where DB2 belongs.

-Viz

IMHO,Given time unix and its operating system next of kin will slowly but surly getch up to W*****S. I maen look at how long Sun Microsystems has managed to keep Solaris and compete with the bignguys like Microso**, Novel/Suse and Red Hat.